Category: Software-Projects

One of the main issues with doing TDD is the fact, that the cycle times between running the unit tests and the development of a feature has to be very short. In fact as short as possible.

In other languages there are always tools like autotest for ruby or infinitest or JUnitMax for Java.

I missed such a tool badly in Delphi, because it makes the development so much faster when the tests are running automatically in the background everytime the code has changed.

So I created autotest4delphi. It uses Growl as notify engine and outputs all relevant command line output of the compiler / test appropriately colored to the console and it’s configured via a simple INI-file.

The tool itself is written in Delphi 2006. I have not ported it yet to Delphi XE but this should not be a big problem.

Because some people asked me, how to contribute code to my MediaWiki Access Extension, here a short howto how to do this.

At first, you have to get yourself a free account on GitHub. This is as easy as clicking “Pricing and Signup”, selecting the Free Account, fill in the required fields and submit. Maybe you have to activate the account via email (don’t know, it a while since I got my account).

After the account is set up you go the project you wish to contribute to (i.e. https://github.com/magicmonty/MediaWikiAccessControl) and click on the “Fork”-Button. With this you have made your own fork, where you can develop by your hearts content. If you are ready, the code is tested and so on, you can send me a pull request with the changes you want to contribute. I will review this changes as soon as my time it allows and if I happy with it, I will merge the changes into my code.

For my first Air project for the BlackBerry PlayBook (more about it follows, when it is approved ) I used the Adobe FlashBuilder 4. While this tool is quite comfortable to use in PlayBook development (especially the debugging capabilities), I’m not willing to pay 250 to 750$ for an IDE just to develop some free tools. This is simply not rentable.

The next thing is, that I wanted to have a possibility to build the project outside the IDE (already with CI in mind).

As a java developer my choice falls to Apache Ant as a build tool and Git as version control.

So I created an Ant script and some templates, which bootstraps me a new Air project in a new GIT repository.